Activists see palm harvest as seedbed for bettering life

Seasonal demand for fronds could be a way to promote policies of `fair trade' movement

April 04, 2004|By Hugh Dellios, Tribune foreign correspondent.

OAXACA, Mexico — The procession of many palm fronds distributed to churchgoers on Palm Sunday actually begins when thousands of villagers enter the forests of southern Mexico and northern Guatemala.

Wearing huaraches on their feet, and on the lookout for deadly snakes, entire families harvest the wild fronds with sharp little knives under the tree canopy where the endemic species grows. The fronds are then exported north to the United States.

"People know when the high seasons are, like Holy Week, and everybody goes--women, children, everybody," said Janett de los Santos, an ethnobotanist who works with Oaxacan indigenous communities.

The palm trade has spawned a unique idea: Could the seasonal demand be harnessed as a way to protect Mexico and Central America's diminishing forests and provide steadier work for poor families being forced to leave their homes for lack of income?

In recent months, a coalition of environmentalists, church groups and fair-trade advocates has been trying to develop a market-based certification process in which palm producers would be paid extra for guaranteeing they are caring for the forests where wild palms grow and following environmentally safe harvesting practices.

Spawning a niche movement

While importers and exporters are skeptical, proponents say the process would be similar to programs that promote organic coffee and fair wages for coffee growers. Many church groups have joined that niche movement, and doing it with the palms might offer more religious meaning.

"I think there would be a tremendously positive response," said Sarah Ford, coordinator of the Interfaith Fair Trade Initiative of the Lutheran World Relief organization in Baltimore.

"People of faith in particular are willing to spend money when they are assured it is going to a good cause, and this would be particularly poignant with the palms and what they signify in the Christian church," she said.

The organizers have set a target date of Easter 2005 to have the program in place and hope to begin educating church administrators with small budgets on why such a program would be worth the money. They already have conducted opinion surveys at churches throughout the U.S. and they found the response heartening.

The project is driven by the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, a watchdog agency associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Rainforest Alliance. The latter group is trying to develop the right certification process and good harvesting strategies in Guatemala and Mexico, where the palms historically were not well regulated.

"If we can get the message out there that when people are buying the palm, they are not just buying the palm, then we might expand the market," said Dean Current, a research associate at the University of Minnesota's Center for Integrated Natural Resource and Agricultural Management, who conducted the church surveys.

Interest in `fair trade'

"We're trying to keep people working in the forest," Current said. "If the palms have more value to the community, they will take better care of it."

Current sent out 800 church surveys a year ago and received nearly 300 back. Sixty percent of polled congregations said they would pay more for certified "fair trade" palms, while 15 percent said they would buy fewer palms if the price went up.

Ford said 18 percent of Lutheran congregations in the U.S. have fair-trade coffee promotion programs, through which parishioners bought 45 tons of premium coffee last year. Other products environmentally certified by the Rainforest Alliance include timber, Ecuadorean bananas and Costa Rican ferns.

While the Palm Sunday palm market is currently worth $4.5 million a year, organizers hope they can expand it and resuscitate demand as part of year-round floral arrangements. Once a staple in the wider market, the palms were displaced more recently by other greens, but only the wild Chamaedorea offers such a good potential tool to protect the hemisphere's forests.

Environmentalists warn that Mexico's hardwood forests and rainforests are being harvested at an alarming rate to provide timber income and cattle grazing lands for local communities. They also fear that the wild palms are wastefully harvested, although an increasing amount is being cultivated on farms for export.

One sign of the depletion are complaints by wild-palm cutters in Oaxaca that they now have to walk four or five hours to reach forest areas where it is thick enough to harvest.

A jolt of additional income would be welcome in southern Mexico's rural communities, which have been hit hard by the steep drop in coffee prices in recent years. Many villagers subsist on corn and beans.

The region supplies an increasing number of the migrants searching for jobs in urban areas or across the border illegally in the U.S. That in turn leads to complaints from palm exporters that there are not enough cutters to supply the demand, even now that it's reduced.